Immeasurable
Seeing those same basketball shorts from three years ago,
the same muted gold on your pile of dirty laundry and
I wanted it all to came back,
but I don’t remember your back
so smooth and muscular,
I don’t remember your skin so pale,
same with those brown spots
scattered across your body like an inverted constellation,
like the night sky I stared at
laying on your bed waiting for your being
to slowly crawl up to mine.
Before your lips could reach mine
I extended my hands and fingers to touch your head,
this time I had no point of reference as to how long,
or short you hair has grown,
or how long this love would last.
Are you the same man whose used towel I kept
unwashed for weeks because I could not move past the thought
of your body held tightly inside that white fabric?
Even as you walked in front of me on the morning after,
on the same path you had taken with me before,
I could not recognize the back, the shoulders that I was following—
they were much too tall,
and you were moving much too quick,
as though you needed to get away from this past.
This time
there will be no hair on my floor to sweep up,
no hair to remind me that I held on,
for far too long.
Science (Makes Nothing Happen)
Different Starbucks, different drink,
same city, three years later
I think about that poem I wrote about you.
I haven’t had to face the physical proof of your death,
yes I’ve romanticized about it,
even made art about it twice your height,
but it was all abstract,
I never needed to look straight at your face
like I did last week at your tombstone.
It doesn’t get any more real than that,
to see the black and white
and all the grey tones in between poetically render
the former image of you—
how could that ever be you.
Phyllis, who hadn’t seen you in over a year as well,
told me to wet some tissues to clean the ash
and dust off of your picture.
How ironic it felt,
for a second I thought could somehow
take death and just wipe it away like dirt,
as though erasing the evidence helps,
but would that bring you back?
I can’t say I didn’t try,
I can’t say I didn’t want to rub out your face from that stone
so that every time I return to this city,
this place of my childhood
I wouldn’t have to be reminded that something is missing,
like that 7-11 where I used to wait for the school bus,
that restaurant where we went for dim sum every weekend,
that playground next to my kindergarten, except
you’re human,
not just a thing, an object
that someday your pieces could just reconstruct,
your grey hairs repainted, wrinkles redrawn,
your favorite purple sweater resewn
because they all went into the fire with you—
I was there, I pressed the button.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed;
you are still never coming back.
Stains
Three years ago you left me
with a ten second hug and a thunderstorm.
I thought that rainstorm had washed away all those feelings,
cleaned away the smell of the smoking area at the club
where we always have unnecessarily deep conversations.
We’ve never kissed there,
every time we get close but you’d move your face
at the last second.
It’s a bad idea, you’d say, people might see.
So tell me, why did you think it was a good idea
to bring me back to that same place?
Nothing has changed there,
same two benches and a glass barricade
looking over at all the people downstairs who don’t matter,
they never matter.
If nothing has changed there
what makes you think my feelings have,
what makes you think I could have had moved on
when all you did was leave me to watch you disappear in the rain?
You had three years in the land where everything changes
and nothing stays together,
just the illusion of adhesion because of the humidity;
you had three more years to change yet I was left static,
frozen at these steps on that night.
I didn’t know what three years would mean;
I didn’t know three years would mean buying an apartment
and deciding that you wouldn’t change in such a place
where it begs you to,
just like did all that time hoping your mind,
your heart would change.
Three years meant more of that body have disappeared at the gym,
three years meant the cigarette smoke is never leaving his clothes
now that he shares your wardrobe,
and I would still never have it in mine.
